School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemThe self and communicative theory : a transcendental perspective( 1996)This thesis aims to contribute to the development of communicative theory by advancing a theory of the self sufficient to support intersubjectivity and meet the conditions required for communicative rationality, communicative ethics and communicative reason. The conclusion, which follows a transformed transcendental approach, supports the theories of intersubjectivity advanced by Jurgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel and Ludwig Wittgenstein evaluated against the background of a detailed analysis of the theories of Immanuel Kant. The exposition commences with a discussion of the origins of communicative theory in the writings of Kant and Charles Sanders Peirce and an outline of the development of the theory by Apel and Habermas. In this discussion the central issue of the thesis is identified as the failure of communicative theory to produce an adequate theory of the self as the subject of communicative transactions. Then follows a discussion of the development of the self in the transcendental theory of Kant, first by outlining the modern sense- of the self from the "synthetic unity of apperception" from the Critique of Pure Reason, and then from - the assertion of transcendental freedom from the Critique of Practical Reason. Apel is then discussed as a major proponent of communicative theory, with special attention paid to his linguistic transformation of transcendental philosophy. It is argued that Ape's moves are successful in providing the basis for a linguistically structured intersubjectivity, but that his failure to free himself from a residual transcendental idealism means that his project is ultimately unsuccessful. In order to advance the discussion towards a successful communicative theory incorporating intersubjectivity Apel and Habermas are discussed in relation to George Herbert lead. It is argued that both Mead's view, and his interpretation by Habermas, fail to fully establish intersubjectivity as they retain elements of a Cartesian introspective subjectivity. An alternative approach developed by Charles Taylor is then discussed. Taylor proposes an expressivist view of the self based on inwardness and an orientation to the good. Such a view fails to overcome the incoherence of Cartesian subjectivity, but does establish the importance of the expressive dimension as a key element. of the self. The concluding chapters propose a non-Cartesian self based on a discussion of the late works of Kant, including the Critique of Judgement and the little known Opus Postumum, and the late works of Wittgenstein. The essential elements identified here are communicability - as a transcendental condition for cognition, and the relationship between language and inner experience. -Finally, it is argued that freedom and - imagination, understood in the context of Kant and the late Wittgenstein, are the key elements to a self capable of supporting the intersubjectivity required by communicative theory.
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ItemCraft to applied science : the Institution of Civil Engineers, London and the development of scientific civil engineering in Britain, 1818-1880( 1996)This thesis examines civil engineering practitioners and practice in Britain in middle part of the nineteenth century. The background and education of a sample of the engineers of the period, who were members of the Institution of Civil Engineers, London, have been determined from the published records of that Institution. This showed, contrary to what has been commonly believed, that civil engineers were drawn from the middle and upper strata of society. They were well educated for the time. Many had advanced schooling, and almost a quarter of them has some university education. The technical papers on civil engineering subjects were also examined over the period from when they commenced publication in 1837 to 1880 to assess any change that may have taken place in the way the engineers approached their problems by adopting or adapting techniques developed in areas of science to their task so as to turn engineering towards applied science. This examination had to be restricted to a few representative areas of civil engineering activity, and structural design, hydrology and hydraulics, foundations and stability of slopes, materials and railway construction were taken as being fairly representative of the range of tasks faced by civil engineers. This study showed a slow and erratic movement towards embracing "scientific methods" into engineering practice. It became established in the field of structural design, but hardly impacted on the approach to railway permanent way or design, or in the area of foundations and slope stability. There were moves however in all areas. Interestingly these moves were generally led by members who had a university training. Their names appear in many of the areas studied indicating they made a significant contribution to shifting engineering towards applied science.
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ItemOn with the motley : the contingent assemblage of knowledge spaces( 1996)This thesis has utilised some previously published material. The introduction draws on Turnbull, D. 1991, Technoscience Worlds, Deakin University Press, Geelong; Turnbull, D. 1997 (forthcoming), Reframing Science and Other Local Knowledge Traditions, Futures,; Turnbull, D. 1996 (in press), Rationality, Objectivity, and Method' pp.16-21 in Helaine Selin ed, Encyclopedia of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Non-western Cultures, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht. Chapter 1 is a modified version of Turnbull, D. 1993, Local Knowledge and Comparative Scientific Traditions, Knowledge and Policy, 6, (3/4), 29-54 with material from Turnbull, D. 1997 (forthcoming). Reframing Science and Other Local Knowledge Traditions, Futures; Turnbull, D. 1996 (in press), Maps and Mapmaking of the Australian Aboriginal People pp.37-39 in Helaine Selin ed, Encyclopedia of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Non-western Cultures, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1996. Chapter 2 is an updated version of Turnbull, D. 1993, The Ad Hoc Collective Work of Building Gothic Cathedrals with, Templates, String, and Geometry, Science Technology and Human Values, 18, 315-40. Chapter 3 takes material from two articles: Turnbull, D. 1996, Constructing Knowledge Spaces and Locating Sites of Resistance in the Early Modem Cartographic Transformation, inSocial Cartography: Mapping Ways of Seeing Social and Educational Change, R. Paulston, ed Garland Publishing Inc., New York, 53-79, and Turnbull, D. 1996, Cartography and Science in Early Modem Europe: Mapping the Construction of Knowledge Spaces, Imago Mundy, 48, 5-24, and a recent paper (En)countering Knowledge Traditions' presented at Science and Other Knowledge Traditions Conference, Calms, August 1996. Chapter 4 is a combination of material from Turnbull, D. 1991, Mapping The World in the Mind: An Investigation of the Unwritten Knowledge of the Micronesian Navigators, Deakin University Press, Geelong and Turnbull, D. 1994, Comparing Knowledge Systems: Pacific Navigation and Western Science, inScience of the Pacific Island Peoples: Vol.1, Ocean and Coastal Studies, J. Morrison, P. Geraghty and L. Crow!, eds Institute of Pacific Studies, Suva, 129-144. Chapter 5 is a revision of Turnbull, D. 1989, The Push For a Malaria Vaccine, Social Studies of Science, 19, 283-300. Chapter 6 is a revision of Turnbull, D. 1995, Rendering Turbulence Orderly, Social Studies of Science, 25, 9-33. The conclusion includes some revised material from Turnbull, D. 1984, Relativism, Reflexivity and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, Metascience: Annual Review of the Australasian Association for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science, 1/2, 47-61.
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ItemInterpretation and practical reason : an examination of Charles Taylor's concept of interpretation as part of his project of practical rationality( 1996)This thesis presents a study of Taylor's interpretive project and its conceptually related view of practical rationality as a post-representational, transformative and realist account. The post-representational character of the project reflects the overcoming of epistemology and the consequent affirmation of a mode of practical rationality. This mode represents an ontological and transformative standpoint, and calls for a realist conception of philosophy which is holistic, expressive and non-a priori in nature. Basic to a realist conception of interpretive reason is an ontological framework of human being, its hypergoods, evaluative distinctions, and the moral space that defines the agent's conception of the good as the personal narrative of his becoming. This moral perspective formulates a structural conception of interpretative explanation which allows the ontological unification of all explanation in human science within the terms of the perspective. The principle of the best available account is a central part of this perspective and is seen to be important in providing the conditions for determining what constitutes distinctively human characteristics and in evaluating interpretative accounts. Constitutive of the moral and interpretive project is an expressive conception of language that can focus on the articulation of feelings and conduct as irreducibly expressive phenomena of first-person accounts. Interpretation must, therefore, be understood as part of an expressive-constitutive framework of language. The structural perspective of interpretative explanation and practical reason is formulated and explored in a metatheory of Taylor's conception of self-interpretation, social and political science, and anthropology. His views of anthropological explanation lead to the development of a notion of a language of perspicuous contrast and a concept of human constant. This language, and the constants involved in its use, are the most basic features of Taylor's project of interpretive reason. They provide a realist and critical standpoint in terms of which rival interpretations can be rationally adjudicated without the interference of ethnocentric factors. The availability and operation of the human constants makes this possible. The critical function of the language seines to formulate and rationally arbitrate all forms of hermeneutic conflict. The significance of the human constants is that they reflect central aspects of the human life form as a constitutive part of the ontology of the morally-engaged human agent oriented to the good that gives significance to his quest in life. It is this conception that underpins the structural unity of all explanation and combines the principle of the best available account with the subject-related properties that characterise the unique and distinctive nature of human being.
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ItemAn unreasonable profession : spiritualism and mediumship between the wars in Britain( 1996)In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Spiritualist claims that the dead survive in another world and communicate with the living became a subject of heated debate within English society. Originating in America in the eighteen-forties, Spiritualism found ready converts in England. By 1870, many periodicals were devoted to chronicling the activities of believers, while newspaper articles, church sermons and scientific reports issued a stream of diverse interpretations to a fascinated audience. Spiritualism has become a subject of lively historical interest in recent times, but most historians assume that it was a Victorian and Edwardian phenomenon, with little relevance in post World War I Britain. I began this study with similar assumptions, but as my research progressed, it became clear that the number of people who identified as Spiritualists grew in the interwar years and that Spiritualism was as controversial during this period as in the previous century. In sketching its passage and growth between the wars, I emphasise Spiritualism's ability to absorb and organise both modem and ancient tropes. As the movement continued to gain in popularity the debate over its meaning and possibilities for humankind grew apace. At the centre of these controversies stood the figure of the medium. The mediumistic persona was constructed inside and outside the Spiritualist movement as feminine. This project engages with issues of gender, subjectivity and power in relation to the development of the mediumistic identity. In doing so I stress the profound ambiguity of that identity. The medium, as represented through diverse narratives, appeared as both subject and object, the source of truth and lies, and the mother of life and death. It was always unclear whether she was psychically gifted or demented, or whether she intended to harm or heal. Confronted with opposing narratives, a coherent sense of "self' was not easily achieved by a medium. Ultimately, this study attempts to show that the mediumistic "self' was never a stable result of private conviction, but a deeply unstable and continually shifting production that developed within particular historical circumstances
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ItemWorld in mind : a commonsense externalist functionalism for cognitive science( 1996)Functionalism has established itself as the dominant philosophical theory of the mind over the past thirty-five years. But it is not without its critics. Among the most persistent have been those who claim that the mind is essentially world-involving in such a way that functionally identical individuals can lead different mental lives because of differences in their physical, social and metaphysical contexts. Hilary Putnam's seminal (1975) argument turns on the claim that the meanings of certain of our terms, in particular natural kind terms, are tied to the hidden structure shared by instances of those kinds, even if this structure has no impact on our cognitive competence. This has been taken by many to mean that the mental states of functionally identical individuals can have different contents. Tyler Burge (1979) extends this line of argument by alleging that socially shared concepts play an essential role in specifying the content of our thoughts. And Stephen Stich (1978a) argues that our everyday belief-ascribing practices are ill-fitted to play a role in cognitive science because, according to those practices, physically identical individuals (Doppelgangers) can have different thoughts in spite of being contextually related to qualitatively indistinguishable objects. In this thesis I argue that Putnam, Burge and Stich fall to make a successful case against an externalist, functionalist interpretation of our commonsense belief-ascribing practices. I argue, instead, that these practices are strongly grounded in an attempt to characterise a person's functional-role profile in terms of contextual features that actually have some bearing on the nature of that profile. In ascribing mental states for the purpose of explaining and predicting behaviour, it is therefore not our aim to incorporate the public meanings of a person's words (Burge), the "real essence" of the things her thoughts are about (Putnam), or the "metaphysical thisness" of some object of thought (Stich) into the content of her thoughts, at the expense of an accurate functional characterisation. If such elements feature in our ascriptions, it is because we have priorities other than behavioural explanation, or because we lack relevant information. I therefore endorse what I call the Doppelganger Principle-the principle that individuals identical in every intrinsic physical respect belong to the same categories for purposes of psychological explanation. My position is nevertheless externalist, in that it is not merely in virtue of their identical physical natures that Doppelgangers belong to the same psychological categories. It is also because they are similarly related to those external factors that shape their functional-role profiles-in particular, certain properties of worldly objects, and certain concepts (which I call proto-concepts) that they share. This means that our common sense concept of mental states is suitable for many of cognitive science's explanatory purposes, subject to the sort of regimentation appropriate to all scientific contexts. As a consequence, I argue that there are two reasons for rejecting Jerry Fodor's (1987) notion of narrow content: first, because it fails to do justice to the world-involving nature of mental states; and second, because it fails to endorse our commonness goal of tracking a person's functional-role profile when we seek to explain her behaviour.
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ItemA speech-act theoretic approach to meaning : conditionals, noun phrases and generality( 1996)This thesis develops an alternative approach to linguistic meaning, which I dub the speech-act theoretical approach, or STA, which neither employs the syntactic and semantic forms of modern logic nor defines meaning in terms of semantic objects. Rather STA envisages the central task of meaning theory as the characterisation of speech-act structures embedded in conversational contexts. The framework is not a supplement to a semantic core-theory, which is the role usually assigned to speech-act theory and pragmatics. Rather the core-theory itself is to be couched in terms of speech-act structures and their modes and deployment. In this thesis, STA is developed in detail to provide an account of if-sentences, noun phrases, pronouns and generality and their interactions. In Part I, chiefly singular if-sentences are examined. A unified treatment of indicatives, counterfactuals, non-declaratives and if-sentences in combination with logical and pragmatic particles is provided. It is argued that semantic treatments of generality, noun phrases and anaphora cannot account for complex anaphoric chains in sentences featuring generality and conditionality. In part 2, STA's treatment of noun phrases, pronouns and generality is described. The complex problems arising in connection with anaphora and generality in if-sentences are treated in detail.
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ItemThe dinosaur alliance : interdisciplinary research and the impact-extinction debate( 1995)This thesis examines the role of multidisciplinary research in the debates over extraterrestrial impact theories of mass extinction throughout the 1980s within a conceptual framework provided largely by Bruno Latour's Science in Action. To this end, the background of the debate is examined with respect to both the theoretical legacy of uniformitarianism and the failure of impact theories of mass extinction prior to the modern extinction debate. The ability of the Alvarez group to enrol support from a variety of sources is described and the repercussions of their research, including the input of astronomy and statistics in transforming the extinction debate into the study of the earth as part of a larger astronomical system. The volcanic challenge to impact theories is examined before concluding with a discussion of the importance of nuclear winter research and the role of the popular press in facilitating communication across disciplinary boundaries and generating support for theories of extraterrestrial mass extinction.
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ItemInstituting the state : European state formation in Europe and the Americas 800-1800 A.D( 1995)This is a thesis about the place of the long term process of state formation in the development of the West. Conventional historiography and historical sociology have under-theorised the longue duree of the institutional creation of the apparatus of power. Theories of state formation have sought to explain the long term transformation of Western states in a variety of ways. Weber and Elias privilege processes of monopolisation and rationalisation of force and taxation in their historical sociologies. Perry Anderson throws into relief the long-lasting legacy of Antiquity in the West. Others, such as Anthony Giddens and Charles Tilly, focus on the institutionalisation of coercion. This thesis takes issue with these images of state formation, arguing that the monopolisation of power is, in fact, a process of the creation of symbolic, administrative, and coercive institutions through which ruling elites can effectively govern. Following Cornelius Castoriadis' social theory of the imaginary institution, this is called the institutional imagination. The creation of the means and meaning s through which central authorities can rule, occurs within a field of tension that is present throughout most of the Middle Ages and the early modern period in Western Europe. The generation of the institutions of governance is shaped by a tension between major power elites located at the centre of regal authority, and provincial and urban contenders who are relatively independent of the central monarchical court state. This tension is most pronounced in the feudal and standestaat figurations of power in which the command of monarchies is historically weakest. Provincialism and urban autonomies endure under absolutism, sparking major conflicts that mostly revolve around claims to further power by the court state. Some of these dissolved the absolutist figuration, instituting new state forms (the Dutch Revolt, the English Civil War), whilst retaining some of the tension that characterised it. Others (the Fronde, the comunero revolt) resulted in the institution of stable monarchical forms. The tension was not limited to the legislative, fiscal, and military capacities of the court state apparatus. It is a major argument of this thesis that mercantilism was a crucial source of the origins of modern capitalism. The court state sought to curtail the influence of urban guilds and councils over the economy. In doing so, it was eroding the lingering relative independence of provincial and urban bodies. Accompanying the mercantilisation of economic life was the expansion of states into the Americas. The mercantile imagination was the driving force behind European exploration and colonialism. The empires created by court states were empires of absolutism, and they extended the tension of state formation into the societies of the New World. However, this was no simple reproduction of the patterns of state formation that had characterised Western Europe. Imperial states were also altered by the conditions of colonial life in the Americas. The republics that were created after the upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reflected the Spanish and English legacies of imperial state formation. The new republics were also modern states insomuch as they generated new types of institutions. American republicanisms came at the end of the millennium long process of state formation that began with the collapse of the Carolingian Empire. The millennium ended at the cusp of the empires of absolutism and new republican state forms.
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ItemIntentionality and transcendence : closure and openness in Husserl's phenomenology( 1994)Husserl's philosophy begins with the problem of knowledge. It is posed in the form of the problem of the relation between the 'inside' and the 'outside', and Husserl responds with transcendental idealism - that is, an answer which seems firmly to resolve the problem in favour of the 'inside', not withstanding Husserl's characterisation of phenomenology as a philosophy of intentionality. The thesis interrogates this response. It asks and attempts to answer three questions: what is the meaning of the method - `reduction' - that leads Husserl to his conclusion; what is the meaning of transcendental phenomenology as a transcendental idealism; and in what sense is Husserl's phenomenology still a philosophy of openness? Part One examines the form which the problem of knowledge takes in Husserl's early phenomenology and which informs and determines the development of an adequate method in epistemology. Its first form is that of an abstractive exclusion of all 'presuppositions', all transcendence; but upon reflection this form is seen to fail. Reconsideration of the meaning of `presupposition' and 'presuppositionlessness' sees rearticulation of the reduction as transcendental reduction, a 'defamiliarisation' of the all-pervading ontic ordering referred to as the `natural attitude'. This is Husserl's mature method, a procedure which, in revealing transcendence a transcendental acceptance, supplies to objectivity its concrete ground. Part Two examines the results of the application of this method, first, in the case of the real, spatio-temporal object, and second, in the case of the immanent object. 'Object' comes to be posed as a problem in its identity, because, though being 'one', it emerges out of a flux